Suleyken was so tender

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Suleyken was so tender is Siegfried Lenz's first collection of short stories . It was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 1955 . The volume consists of 20 stories, the plot of which is set in rural Masuria , mainly in the fictional village of Suleyken . Several characters appear in different stories, others only in one.

Style and narrative perspective

The plot slides again and again from the realistic to the caricature , almost absurd . An example of this would be the story Duel in Short Sheep's Clothing , in which two men from neighboring villages meet in their horse-drawn sleighs on a forest path. Since no one wants to evade, they stay there for months and are provided with food by the residents of their respective villages. Only because of the planned construction of a railway line will both be removed by crane.

An oral narrative process is imitated by a partly dialectic, Masurian- based choice of words and short commentary insertions ("Does anyone already know the story? Well, then I want to tell it."). This is supported by the fact that the narrator mentions his family relationships to some characters and makes it clear that he grew up in Suleyken himself. However, the narrator does not play a role in the progress of the plot in any story, so that one can speak of a hybrid form or a change between observing first-person narrator and authoritative narrator.

epilogue

In an afterword entitled “Discrete information about Masuria” , the author makes it clear that the village mentioned and the events described are fictional ; so there is no direct correspondence with the real village of Suleyken . He outlines his view of the Masurian mentality and explains that the stories are “winking declarations of love to [his] country” and “little explorations of the Masurian soul”. Therefore he has "methodically exaggerated" in order to bring out the characteristics of the people.

filming

From December 20, 1971, a 13-part television series of the same name ran on German television , in which Lenz participated as a narrator.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Title of the 20 stories according to the table of contents ( PDF , approx. 114 kB)
  2. ^ Siegfried Lenz: Suleyken was so tender - Masurian stories. Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1955; Paperback edition: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1960; Reprinted there in 1974 and more often, ISBN 978-3-436-00321-0 , p. 117.
  3. ↑ Suleyken was so tender . From fernsehserien.de, accessed on January 12, 2017